


Burning Euryale

by legarevirtuoso



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-27
Updated: 2013-07-27
Packaged: 2017-12-21 12:16:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/900209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legarevirtuoso/pseuds/legarevirtuoso
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She’s getting good at the art of killing people by herself.<br/><b>Prompt:</b>  VI - 48. Chrome – fighting a battle by herself; “And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone.”<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Euryale

**Author's Note:**

> I actually rather like Chrome. I really do. So it’s kind of hard for me to reconcile the Chrome of the video games to the manga, and then back to the anime. Really, there’s a big difference. For starters, in the manga/anime, every time Chrome looks like she might do something up to her potential, Mukuro jacks her body or someone pulls hacks and some male shows up to save her. In the game... combo spam square and triangle and problem solved. Dammit, I want to see my favorite zombie do something already.

They rely on her to kill herself, bit by bit and piece by piece as she sells her soul to the ferryman himself to keep them from harm. She is the doll that dances to the strings of a madman halfway across the world, the harmless shell that no one suspects and no one sees coming. Chrome waltzes with the devil in her pretty cloak of mist and no one knows the wiser, claim it is the illusionist insanity that plagues her. But she knows that is a lie, cradles her head against the concrete wall and smiles at her sleeping friends. Vongola claims they are outsiders, the Vendice escapees and their mad hatter leader that sleeps within the dormouse girl. Chrome cannot see them but for the family that they have become, relishes their presence with all that she can muster.

When the Vongola Tenth sets Mukuro free she knows she is doomed to be cast aside.

Chrome perseveres anyway, clutches her mockery of a trident to her chest and is the first one in line when volunteers are called for. Tsuna never tells her no, but never lets her go alone into the cesspool of society they now call home. When she sallies forth she does it with a varying companion, never one to shine in her own brilliance. Yamamoto smiles as he keeps her behind him, treats her like glass and fluffs her hair as he calls her his little sister. She doesn’t really mind, thinks her hair black and tries to laugh like he does to keep the mission from falling to pieces. Chrome likes it best when she is sent out with the Cloud Man, prefers the silent wake of destruction and the even tempered and matter of fact acknowledgment of her fangs. She hides him with her lies and takes a sinister delight in unveiling him at the most pivotal moments with devastating results. Chrome stays out of Mukuro-sama’s way, drifts along in his wake like the afterthought she is, because she knows he’d rather see her in the dream instead. His cute little Chrome is too precious to taint beyond the barest of relations, Hellfire resembles her own will far too closely, and Chrome sometimes wonders if it’s worth leaving the realm of Nod.

The missions for the Mist Guardians are cut and dry, a plethora of sneaking and backstabbing that would make Chrome’s mother weep if she even had one to acknowledge her. Tsuna doesn’t know what he asks of her, why it is she smiles so frailly at her mission partner before she goes to chat with their target.

Mukuro-sama leaves her outside when he does this, but Chrome knows exactly what the screams really mean.

She exists in her own halved way, drowns in the mirage that is her will and wonders why it is that blood can be lied away so easily when she can still see it glinting darkly on her uniform. When her beloved Boss calls her in she will be as honest as is necessary, gleamed more from the Faustian transaction than even Mukuro-sama has realized. She is not really a puppet any longer, is proud of what the future has taught her and what she can accomplish. Instead she is held in much the same status as Bianchi and the steadily growing I-Pin, feared on the one hand and pitied on the other. The whispers follow her like she follows Mukuro-sama, call her a twisted multitude of names that she doesn’t deserve.

But this time will be different.

This time there is no one to go where the Boss needs them. Storm and Rain are away in Singapore, quieting the Triad with strategic precision. Thunder and I-Pin have exams. Cloud and Mist have split to cover the opposite poles of Japan, and Chrome rather prays that Mukuro-sama won’t be that inconvenienced by the sudden appearance of the Kokyu Gang. Sun is off in South America, dealing with Columbian drug lords while using all of his extreme enthusiasm. Basil is still training with CEDEF, and no sane man would send the Varia for a mission this small. Not even Bianchi is available to deal with the current threat. There is literally no one to send, for Tsuna himself is confined under Reborn’s orders.

So Chrome must go alone.

They don’t want her to go, swear to tell Mukuro where she’s gone in an attempt to make sure she gets capable backup in time. In turn she leaves without even packing an overnight bag, props what’s left of her sanity against the lingering shreds of dignity. She wraps herself in shadows and spider silk, walks out the front door with nary a glance behind her and a confounding bounce in her step. Mukuro-sama leaves the ring with her these days and for that she is glad, reverberates her will through her spine and lets it congeal into a sticky mess of flesh to serve as her organs.

She vanishes at the gate, doesn’t pause even as she accomplishes the impossible in the name of the greater good.

When Chrome makes it to the target she is silent and still, holds her breath out of habit more than necessity. Her trident is light in her grip, reflects her attachment to reality and the process of living with all the sinister inclinations of the power she contains. The Vongola need the Masciatti famiglia to die and Chrome is more than happy to do it.

The gate guards die of panic as she boils them alive with streams of red hot magma.

She wraps herself in the smallest one’s skin, lets her illusions hide the blood trails and wipes the walls clean with misted grace. His mind is her oyster, shelled and gobbled up with greedy intentions, and she has become everything that he can no longer. Chrome goes in a corner, locked up in a box that would make Pandora cry, and instead it is Frederico Masciatti who takes the reins.

It’s hard to pretend this doesn’t affect her, that the patterns the blood makes as her trident dances don’t make her gag.

Her mission is to see this through to the end, spread discord and the seeds of dissent with a painter’s hand. So she smiles and aims, shoots a man in the forehead and uses his brains to give new texture to the otherwise drab white walls. She spins in the mist, wears the flesh of the dead to cheerfully and skillfully annihilates the underlings. They didn’t stand a chance, not really, and a lesser person would feel guilty. And as she gently cuts another man’s head off with his mistress’s signature garrote, she wonders how the rest of her famiglia would clear this mission. But it’s no time for idle thoughts, here in her makeshift Carnival Copse, not while the main performance has yet to come and she is nowhere near finished setting the stage.

Chrome Dokuro fights alone, parts the proverbial sea of blood with a flick of her wrist and proves just why it is that the mist is such a frightening flame.

She fights through sin and redemption, loses herself in the carnage and almost doesn’t hear when the earpiece buzzes with the frantic voice of her boss. Her back-up is early, Mukuro-sama and the Cloud Man both having blazed their way through their own missions to make sure Chrome wouldn’t be alone. She would laugh if she had the proper mindset to do it, wades through the kitchen and makes a sandwich amidst the mutilated corpses. Chrome isn’t Mukuro-sama, no matter what Gokudera seems to think when he sees her, but she’s been in her own skin enough times to feel how Mukuro-sama stretches their shared power and winds reality around his pinky. She summons snakes and sends Mukurou to fly at their eyes, spins flames and slams down walls of earth and rubble. Chrome’s body remembers, and it is to her credit that she can use Mukuro-sama’s power like a program coded into the mainframe of a computer.

When she is tired of the blood, she slips into a dead man’s image and locks herself into that magical lockbox in her mind. Chrome isn’t Chrome, isn’t Nagi or even Frederico. Now she is Raul Estrelle, knocks back vodka like water and sleeps with a gun under his pillow in fear of the death in the night. His wife kisses him when he goes home, and his daughter smiles with baby dimples when he coos and tickles her under the chin. He is a family man, joined the mafia to keep them safe with what little he had to offer, and a kindhearted neighbor. Raul fixes the plumbing before he leaves again the next morning, kisses his beloved and waves at his darling, and something in his bones tells him that something will happen.

Chrome was quiet when she killed him, eviscerated him and left his intestines to ooze out of him as he screamed and begged for a mercy she wouldn’t give.

The Masciatti are afraid of the things that bump in the night, the predators that spring from the woodwork to swallow them whole. And as the fear grows, the bad blood slows and turns to stone, festers and spreads until there is nothing left but blind panic. She wears her own skin when they start killing themselves, walks like a ghost through strangely silent halls and isn’t the least bit proud of what she has done. Chrome has done her job, nothing more and nothing less, and when it’s all over she’ll probably have to do it again to some other famiglia. Tsuna would rather ask the Cloud Man or Mukuro-sama to do this, would resort to Gokudera or Yamamoto if he absolutely had to. But he would never happily send Chrome. And as she stares at the bodies of the living and the dead, Chrome realizes why. She’s scared but won’t admit it, wishes she could just go home with Ken and Chikusa and pretend she never did this, and nothing but her own devotion keeps her at her task.

She burns the bodies with Mist and pure determination, watches the ashes spread off into the wind in relative silence.

And when she turns on her heel she goes to finish her role, glides on marble floors and up sweeping staircases until she makes it to where her real target is.

The door opens without a sound and swings open on a solitary figure standing in front of the unlit fireplace. He turns and toasts her quietly with his glass, knows his end is near and accepting it with infinite grace. Leonardo Lippi has always been good about that sort of thing, and Chrome knows that is why Mukuro-sama chose to borrow his identity in that future that will never happen. She could leave him alive, hide him away with Mist until Mukuro-sama had need of his body. But that would be wrong, and it is not her mission to let this man live to see another day.

Chrome is nothing but thorough.

She walks out of Hell covered in blood and death, walks straight out past the gates and hides herself away from reality. Chrome is dying, bit by bit, slips away into the world of dreams and slowly but surely becomes nothing more than an extension of a madman. She doesn’t mind, not really, because she already knows that her life is long over and nothing but the impossible keeps her heart beating. Tsuna asked her before if she wanted to go back to her old life, slip off the shell that was Chrome Dokuro and prance her way back to her mother’s side. And she had smiled then, laughed behind her hand and marveled at the taste of each ‘kufufu’ that slipped past her lips.

“Lo nego.”

Tsuna doesn’t understand, and frankly it worries her that her Boss could be so dense.

“Il mio nome e Chrome Dokuro, Vongola Nebbia.” And she means it, accepts her role and is accepted in turn, and suddenly she realizes that maybe this time she won’t have to die to serve her Famiglia.  



End file.
